Serena Williams was a teenage phenom, and while it was great for her career, it was also very challenging for her to deal with at the time.
The 23-time major winner was not a late bloomer in tennis because she was a tennis phenom even before she entered the pros. The world had not seen a talent like that before, and she ended up delivering a career that many consider to be the greatest career we've ever seen from a tennis player.
That publicity early on was great because it only added to her success but was also overwhelming at times. She was a teenager who needed to look out for herself in an unfamiliar world. She recalled some of those feelings recently when talking to the Associated Press during a premiere of her documentary, admitting that she had to be guarded to keep her sanity.
"In my position and growing up as a teenager and 14, I kind of had to be guarded to just kind of stay sane, and just being in so much press and just doing, everything that I was doing traveling the globe every year."
As the years went by, the American was better equipped to handle the attention and the pressure. The Tour is a hard place to be, because tennis never stops. It's played every week and tennis players barely get any time to really rest up or recover in any meaningful way. The documentary about her shows that very well.
"It wasn't like you are on tour and you took a break and you had a couple of years off. It was every week. So it was a grind and it's really cool to see a different side or not a different side, a true side of what happened behind the scenes. I have seen those eight episodes in the docuseries but I am just excited to see it tonight all over again."
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